Journal of Free Speech Law: "Freedom of Speech and AI Output," by Profs. Mark Lemley and Peter Henderson and Me

Just published, closing out our symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Speech.

The article is here; the Introduction:

Is the output of generative AI entitled to First Amendment protection? We're inclined to say yes. Even though current AI programs are of course not people and do not themselves have constitutional rights, their speech may potentially be protected because of the rights of the programs' creators. But beyond that, and likely more significantly, AI programs' speech should be protected because of the rights of their users—both the users' rights to listen and their rights to speak. In this short Article, we sketch the outlines of this analysis.

Comments

[mydisplayname]

An excellent, easily-readable paper! I'm delighted to read that -- "The First Amendment protects 'speech' and not just speakers; and while the Fourteenth Amendment protects the liberty of 'person[s],' that includes the liberty to hear and not just to speak" -- that "To the extent that the First Amendment aims to protect democratic self-government, the search for truth, and the marketplace of ideas, that must extend to the rights of those who would consider the speech in making democratic decisions, in trying to identify the truth, and in weighing the value of rival ideas, and not just to the rights of those who create and distribute the speech."

AI and IW (information warfare) are interrelated. The "development and achievement of national information warfare goals" has been a topic of interest since 1995: at that time RAND was commissioned to (and did, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR661.html) examine information warfare using "The Day After" model, which concluded in part that there is no "front line" in an information war. Equally importantly, the RAND study noted that traditional boundaries would be blurred -- that "Traditional distinctions — public versus private interests, warlike versus criminal behavior — and geographic boundaries, such as those between nations as historically defined" would be perplexing.

As a hypothetical, consider that an information combatant who attacked at the highest levels of government could, absent a fully-implemented right-to-listen and other safeguards, initiate a physical civil war using nothing but misinformation.